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The linguistic arrow of time

Two recent notes on the Language Log, by Sally Thomason and Mark Liberman, discuss a nutty book, The Secret History of the English Language, by M. J. Harper. I haven’t read the book, but according to...

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The big blip

If you were an astute or lucky stock trader on the afternoon of May 6, you could have bought shares of Accenture PLC for a penny each and sold them a minute later for almost $40. Or you could have...

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Dotted lines

Where I grew up, a dotted line ran through the neighborhood, just beyond my back yard. On maps, that line marked the boundary between the city of Philadelphia and its inner-ring suburbs. On the ground,...

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World3, the video

Still more on World3 and The Limits to Growth. Two weeks ago I gave a talk at Harvard on all this, and the video is now online. Look for the Brian Hayes–March 30 link near the bottom of the page. The...

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Methuselah’s choice

My late friend Stan Ulam used to remark that his life was sharply divided into two halves. In the first half, he was always the youngest person in the group; in the second half, he was always the...

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The Mother Ditch

I was in Santa Fe for a couple of weeks. When I went out for my morning run, I followed a paved pathway along the “river” (a parched, sandy channel, even in the monsoon season). I found my way back to...

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Black and white in one dimension

At the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington I find myself writing again about racial segregation, and specifically about Thomas C. Schelling’s mathematical model of how people wind up living in...

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Lopsided

Sifting through the election results last week, I noticed that the precinct where I used to live in Durham, North Carolina, voted 620 to 40 in favor of the Blue candidate in the U.S. Senate race....

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Fast money, slow data

The other day I bought lunch from a food truck on the Harvard campus, paying with a debit card that my server swiped through one of those little plastic doodads attached to an iPhone. Ten minutes...

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Mad Max Economics

Writing in The New York Times, the business columnist Eduardo Porter quotes Paul Ehrlich quoting Kenneth Boulding: “Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either...

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Flipping Wyoming

Last week I spent five days in the driver’s seat, crossing the country from east to west, mostly on Interstate 80. I’ve made the trip before, though never on this route. In particular, the 900-mile...

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April Fool Redux

I have a scheme to rescue the swooning U.S. economy. My idea partakes of the silliness that always accompanies the coming of April, but it’s not entirely an April Fool joke. T. S. Eliot told us that...

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We Gather Together…

The Thanksgiving holiday is upon us, but Anthony Fauci and the CDC and 79 percent of epidemiologists are urging us to forgo the big family gathering this year. I’m sure that’s sound advice, but I...

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